Children spend an increasing amount of time surfing and communicating over the Internet. There are many online communities, chat rooms, and social networking services, which facilitate these activities, such as Yahoo.com, Skype.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Webkinz.com and the like.
Communication with anonymous persons over the Internet presents well-known and publicized security concerns, especially for children. Online children can become the targets of criminals, identity thieves, sexual predators, etc. Presently, it can be impossible for a parent or guardian to know with whom a child is communicating online. Further, it can be more difficult for a parent or guardian to prevent strangers or online predators from communicating with a child. The problem of protecting children from online dangers has not been solved.
Children urgently need protection from online predators and criminals. It would be particularly useful to provide parents with a secure, convenient, and automated system for limiting and selecting the people that have Internet-based communication with a child. Parents and other authorities need a system that can limit Internet communication to acceptable entities such as people that a child knows and has met personally. Also, it would be useful to provide parents with control over who can communicate with a child. Attempts to address these problems have been insufficient. For example, EP1755060 to Nakajima describes restricted use of portable game consoles that require the use of a single device (i.e. terminal) for local and remote communication. Nakajima also employs automated identifier exchange, thereby eliminating personal control over communications. Furthermore, parental control and plenary review are missing.